I hypothesized that in my post above. But the issue remains is as far as I know there is no history of a stipulation like that before for digital games. GMG has offered a 20-25% coupon code for almost every major release on PC, and it always ends up being cheaper than MSRP, even in cases where there's a preorder discount on Steam or whatnot. This is the only case where I can even think of this hypothetical situation (because it will always remain hypothetical because nobody involved would comment on it regardless of if it is or isn't true) and it's coming from one of the most pro-consumer companies in the industry.I can't confirm this, but I thought sometimes there are stipulations for resellers imposed by the publisher on how low they can price a game, particularly for pre-release/launch time, when they are buying the game directly from the publisher. You'll notice Steam, Origin, UPlay, and even GOG have the game priced at 10% off or $53.99 in the US. The only exception is the 20% off on Steam as part of the loyalty discount for owning the last 2 games, but that's about it.
It's possible that whoever bought a key directly from CDP agreed to not sell it lower than 10% off and no one could undercut the GOG price. With the GMG price at $39 being the best price on the game (Nuuvem is cheaper, but you have to go through some form of VPN to buy from them in the US), maybe they had to go through a middle man, sell at a loss, in order to bypass this restriction.
Again, don't know if this correct, but it would be in line with their comment of CDP prioritizing GOG, and not wanting the game sold cheaper somewhere else.
The issue with this is that GOG isn't even technically the best deal, if we're going by CDProjekt authorized resellers. As horrible a piece of software uPlay is, and I would have to seriously question the state of mind of anyone who willingly bought something there that's available elsewhere, they offer a choice of one of four free games, and include every preorder bonus available on GOG.Maybe CDPR's decision to exclude GMG was driven by the fact that they want best deal to be GOG, but is it that bad? They want push GOG and grow it as business, game like TW3 is great for doing that.